The main cause of high transaction costs is that the demand for transactions has reached the limit for what the bitcoin network can handle (currently 1MB of glo

The main cause of high transaction costs is that the demand for transactions has reached the limit for what the bitcoin network can handle (currently 1MB of global transaction data per 10 minutes). There is no general consensus as to how to solve this though and the community is split between "big blockers" and "small blockers". Big blockers believe that it should possible to solve this problem directly, by increasing the block size limit. "Small blockers" argue that this is not a suitable solution in the long term because the block size would need to grow to gigabytes per minute to compete with existing payment networks and that would be technically challenging and politically undesirable (since only a handful of well-connected nodes would be able to handle all that traffic). The promised solution, according to the small blockers, is to add extra layers to the bitcoin network, with things such as the Lightning Network. Regular folk would clear their transactions through payment processors and only these payment processors would still use the original bitcoin network. Big blockers complain that these second-layer solutions are not truly decentralized and do not conform to the original ideals of bitcoin. They also point out that there are lots of unsolved problems and technical challenges for these second layer solutions, which have been constantly "just around the corner" for a long time...